Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability

Book description

Design a highly available Exchange 2013 messaging environment using real-world examples

In Detail

Microsoft Exchange 2013 is the most widely used messaging platform in the world. Learning how to deploy it in a highly available manner is as fascinating and challenging as it is crucial for every organization.

This practical hands-on guide will provide you with a number of clear scenarios and examples that will explain the mechanics behind the working of Exchange Server High Availability 2013 and how maximum availability and resilience can be achieved through it. For most organizations around the world, e-mail is their top mission-critical service. Throughout nearly 20 years of Exchange development, Microsoft has been improving the Exchange platform, making it more user-friendly and reliable with each release. From Windows clusters, to Cluster continuous replication and database availability groups, the progress of Exchange in terms of availability and resilience is extraordinary.

Throughout this book, you will go through all the roles, components, and features that should be considered when addressing high availability. You will go through how to achieve high availability for the Client Access and Mailbox server roles, what's new in load balancing, site resilience, the new public folders, and much more.

You will learn to successfully design, configure, and maintain a highly available Exchange 2013 environment by going through different examples and real-world scenarios, saving you and your company time and money, and eliminating errors.

What You Will Learn

  • Design and configure high availability and site resilience for Exchange 2013 roles and components
  • Take advantage of the new monitoring features of Exchange 2013
  • Perform Disaster Recovery, backup, and restoration of Exchange 2013
  • Understand the importance of high availability and resilience
  • Improve high availability comprehensively through the use of the Transport service
  • Use the monitoring features of Exchange 2013 to achieve a higher level of availability
  • Comprehend the influence of the new architecture of Exchange 2013 in high availability

Table of contents

  1. Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability
    3. Credits
    4. About the Author
    5. About the Reviewers
    6. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why Subscribe?
        2. Free Access for Packt account holders
        3. Instant Updates on New Packt Books
    7. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Errata
        2. Piracy
        3. Questions
    8. 1. Getting Started
      1. Defining high availability and resilience
        1. Availability
        2. Resilience
      2. Introducing the new Exchange architecture
        1. Looking at the past
          1. Exchange 2000/2003
          2. Exchange 2007
          3. Exchange 2010
          4. Exchange 2013
      3. Summary
    9. 2. High Availability with the Client Access Server
      1. Removing session affinity
      2. Connecting to Outlook
      3. Load balancing and CAS arrays
        1. The do nothing method
        2. Windows Network Load Balancing (WNLB)
        3. DNS Round Robin
        4. Hardware/virtual load balancers
          1. Layer 4 with a single namespace and IP address
          2. Layer 4 with multiple namespaces and IP addresses
          3. Layer 7 with a single namespace and IP address
          4. Selecting the correct method
      4. The Autodiscover service
        1. Explaining digital certificates for Exchange
          1. Listing best practices
      5. Summary
    10. 3. High Availability with the Mailbox Server
      1. Reducing input/output operations per second
      2. Automatically recovering after storage failures
      3. Managed Store
      4. Automatic Reseed
        1. Configuring folders for databases and volumes
        2. Mounting volume folders
        3. Mounting database folders
        4. Creating a database directory structure
        5. Creating a mailbox database
        6. Checking the database creation
        7. Testing AutoReseed
      5. Revisiting Database Availability Groups
        1. Best copy selection changes
        2. The DAG Management Service
        3. The DAG network auto-configuration
        4. Single copy alert enhancements
        5. Lagged copy enhancements
        6. Dynamic Quorum
          1. Majority Node Set clustering
          2. Windows Server 2012
      6. Introducing modern Public Folders
        1. Best practices
      7. Explaining the Offline Address Book
        1. Best practices
      8. Summary
    11. 4. Achieving Site Resilience
      1. Achieving site resilience for client access server
        1. Global namespace
      2. Achieving site resilience for the Mailbox server
        1. Scenario 1 – active/passive
        2. Scenario 2 – active/active
        3. Scenario 3 – third datacenter
          1. Windows Azure
        4. Using Datacenter Activation Coordination (DAC)
          1. Enabling the DAC mode
        5. Deciding where to place witness servers
      3. Summary
    12. 5. Transport High Availability
      1. Servicing of the transport pipeline
        1. Front End Transport service routing
        2. Mailbox Transport service routing
      2. Improving on transport high availability
        1. Revisiting shadow redundancy
          1. Creating shadow e-mails
          2. E-mails arriving from outside the boundary of transport high availability
          3. E-mails sent outside the boundary of transport high availability
          4. E-mails arriving from a Mailbox server within the boundary of transport high availability
          5. Shadow redundancy with legacy Hub Transport servers
          6. Configuring shadow redundancy
          7. Maintaining shadow e-mails
          8. Shadow redundancy after an outage
        2. Safety Net
          1. The working of Safety Net
          2. Resubmitting e-mails from Safety Net
          3. Resubmitting e-mails from Shadow Safety Net
      3. Making an inbound and outbound e-mail flow resilient
        1. Outbound
        2. Inbound
          1. Non-Exchange internal e-mails
          2. Inbound Internet e-mails
      4. Summary
    13. 6. High Availability of Unified Messaging
      1. Introducing the new features of UM
      2. Architectural changes
      3. Unified Messaging ports
      4. Unified Messaging availability
        1. Exchange servers
        2. IP gateways
        3. Incoming calls
        4. Outgoing calls
        5. SIP load balancing
      5. Summary
    14. 7. Backup and Recovery
      1. Understanding the importance of backups
        1. Listing vital components to back up
          1. Client Access Servers
          2. Mailbox servers
            1. Databases and transaction logs
            2. Offline address book
            3. Customizations and logfiles
            4. Unified contact store
        2. Exploring Windows Integrated Backup
        3. Exploring System Center Data Protection Manager 2012
          1. Using DPM to protect Exchange
          2. Installing the DPM server
          3. Allocating storage
          4. Installing DPM Agents on Exchange servers
          5. Creating and configuring protection groups
          6. DPM considerations
        4. Replacing a backup with database availability groups
      2. Planning for disaster recovery
        1. Recovering a mailbox
        2. Recovering a lost server
        3. Explaining database portability in disaster recovery situations
      3. Dial tone portability
        1. Recovering Public Folders
          1. Recovering deleted items
          2. Recovering deleted items post retention
          3. Recovering deleted Public Folders using Outlook
          4. Recovering deleted Public Folders using PowerShell
          5. Recovering deleted Public Folders post retention
      4. Summary
    15. 8. Monitoring Exchange
      1. Introducing Managed Availability
        1. Exploring Managed Availability components
          1. Probes
          2. Monitors
          3. Responders
        2. Health
        3. Customizing Managed Availability
          1. Enabling or disabling a health set
      2. Using the Exchange 2013 SCOM Management Pack
      3. Summary
    16. 9. Underlying Infrastructure
      1. Active Directory
      2. Domain name system
        1. Integrating DNS with Active Directory
      3. Explaining the importance of a network
      4. Using high available storage
      5. Benefiting through virtualization
        1. Backup and restore
        2. High availability
          1. Hyper-V and VMware
            1. Single Exchange on a virtual cluster
            2. Resilient Exchange on a virtual cluster
            3. Other features
      6. Summary
    17. Index

Product information

  • Title: Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 High Availability
  • Author(s): Nuno Mota
  • Release date: February 2014
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781782171508